Crónica starts the year in the best possible way, presenting the first release by Ilia Belorukov in the label.
Ilia Belorukov is a musician from Saint Petersburg, Russia. He works in the directions of improvised, noise and electroacoustic music, collaborating with local and foreign musicians and performers. Ilia practices an experimental approach to sound extraction on alto saxophone, using modular synthesizers and other instruments. He founded the Intonema label and was one of curators of Spina!Rec label. He organised events in Saint Petersburg and Russia and co-organized the Teni Zvuka and Spina!Fest festivals. He writes reviews for Jazzist and notes about music as musicworm in Telegram channel.
This album was created in 2020-2021 in the most strange times of the pandemic, when almost all live music was stopped and many had to work from home. Honestly, this was not something totally unusual for me, as I have a habit to compose at the computer when I have some kind of inspiration or, better said, when I try different things. I tend to work on several concurrent pieces at any given time, slowly developing them, and sometimes finding they can come together as an album.
Scattered Underfoot is one of these cases, and it is something new for me. It is an electroacoustic composition that crosses analog and modular synthesis, field recordings, percussion, and processing. This was an experimental process, exploring possibilities for the computer to add its own inputs by developing chance processes. A similar process was developed with the percussion elements, improvising with small setups of snare drum, cymbal, and objects, focusing on sounds rather on playing, as I am not a drummer, after all. Several of these sessions were collected, serving as a starting point to the compositions.
There is no randomness in the creative process itself, it all comes from thinking and trying to connect sounds and ideas to each other in, most importantly, new ways that I had not already explored in my previous electroacoustic or acoustic improvised music.
Scattered Underfoot is now available as a limited edition tape, and for download and stream from Crónica.